Berlin

Berlin is a great visit, another hip, hop and happening kinda place, an octopus of culture, history, architecture and buzzing activity. Now it’s an established united city you can stay in the old eastern part as I did, in the most concrete bloc type hotel I have ever stayed in, yet it was comfortable and friendly enough. The centre of Berlin covers a very large area and is pleasantly interspersed by swathes of green space which separate different shopping, entertainment and business districts. LIke in many places, sometimes it's best just to wander and see what you come across.

Here is a really cool map of Berlin, clear, interactive and user friendly to help you get around!

To negotiate this metropolis a 'must have' is a standard travelcard (Berlin Welcome Card) which lasts for 48 or 72 hours or even five days, and gives you carte blanche to travel on trams, urban rail, underground and buses. You really have to have one to do yourself justice. Berlin has a super duper transport network which runs very efficiently as you can imagine. It’s the usual mixture of old and new. Old workhorse stations like Berlin Zoo, Friedrichstrasse and Alexanderplatz jostle with their brash new brother, the Hauptbahnhof central station, the space age main Berlin rail terminus with shops as well which carries trains on three levels and has a straight through set of platforms for the big intercity expresses.The Hauptbahnhof, a new edifice of steel and glass stands somewhat apart from the centre across open ground, with a raised track on which you can see slick intercities creeping in and out of the terminus like giant caterpillars Meanwhile you can travel locally on the S-Bahn, the city rail, or the U-Bahn, the subway.





Hauptbahnhof

I caught the train every day from near my hotel in the eastern suburbs and headed straight into town. The track swathes through the centre of Berlin above street level so is a journey worth making on its own to get lots of cityscapes from different angles. and of course with the travel card you can get off and on at a whim. There are lots of open spaces across central Berlin which separate different centres within a centre. It reminds me a little of London with the City, West End, Kensington and so on.

Large open spaces near the Hauptbahnhof provide a fine setting for modern government buildings, the Federal Chancellery (1997-2001), the Paul Lobe building (1997-2001) and the Swiss Embassy, as well as the Reichstag.

Alexanderplatz is as open an urban space as you could want, dominated by the big central overground railway station and the Alexanderplatz TV Tower, a relic of the communist era and poking like a giant needle into the sky with its giant 'flower bulb' near the top. It is Berlin's highest building at 368m, and has a revolving restaurant and great views across the city. Down below, find a bar or café here for lunch, you could do a lot worse. Just down the road from here you reach the Brandenburg Gate (1788-1791), iconic symbol of Berlin and backdrop to defining moments in the city’s history like when Ronald Reagan spoke there encouraging Gorbachev to tear down the Iron Curtain. Also adjoining the Brandenburg Gate is the rebuilt Hotel Adlon (1995-97). You can see it in the background in the photo below.



Brandenburg Tor

Just round the corner from the Brandenburg Gate is the Reichstag building, built between 1884 and 1894, a must see, although probably worth an early start to avoid too long a queue. It has been the seat of the German Bundestag since 1999. A big brash classical building, it stands like a bullying brother dominating the buildings around. it really is seriously large with its four towers. It also stands at the eastern end of that elegant avenue, Unter Den Linden. Once you have negotiated the queue you can climb to the great glass dome at the top designed by Norman Foster and admire the all round views across the city including the government quarter. Well worth it!



Reichstag



Norman Foster Dome

Views from inside Reichstag dome

The mighty Reichstag

Yours truly at the Reichstag!

Reichstag roof views

You can also visit the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, the really big old Berlin rail station that was meant to be a daddy of rail termini. Now there is just a forlorn old frontage on the edge of a busy city street with no more than a sign to signify its former glory.




What's left of Anhalter Bahnhof

Traces of the Berlin Wall criss-cross the city and help you swot up on your history. One section reaches Checkpoint Charlie down Friedrichstrasse, the famous border crossing between the US and Soviet sections of the city from Cold War days, where you can take a photo of the booth and visit the Berlin Wall Museum which tells you all about the former divided city. 



Checkpoint Charlie

Niederkirchner Strasse

Nearby if you walk along the wall for a while in Niederkirchner Strasse you get to an exhibition of the Nazi era (Topography of Terror exhibition ) which tells you all about the surrounding buildings and how they all fitted into the Third Reich nerve centre.

 Potsdammerplatz is a giant confluence of city streets with concrete reaching to the heavens and gleaming glass and reflections, including a state of the art shopping and eating emporium, even here in the open spaces you can trace remnants of the Berlin Wall. Here is the Sony Complex (1996-2001) with a 103m high tower and roof shaped like a tent.





Views of Potsdammerplatz

Museum Island is worth a visit, a collection of classical buildings between two arms of the river Spree and just to the north off that famous Berlin avenue with its wide tree lined walkways, Unter Den LInden, which slices past its own clusters of classic buildings, including the Berliner Dom Cathedral.




The elegant Unter den Linden

I visited the Pergamum Museum, lots to see if you are into Egyptology and ancient cultures. Again the sort of place you might find Indie scanning classical documents with a magnifying glass. All these places can be reached easily by jumping on the nearest tram. Berlin Cathedral is near here, a former court and palace church built between 1894 and 1905. There are four other treasure filled museums at this point: the Bode Museum, the Old Museum, the Old National Gallery and the New Museum.

Pergamum Museum



Berlin Cathedral

Kurfurstendamm is another iconic major central Berlin hub and a place to strut your stuff, get a bite to eat and wander the upmarket streets. Here is the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church preserved as a reminder of the horrors of past war. Wander down the elegant Kurfurstendamm boulevard to soak up the vibes! Are you a posh shopper? Get down here as soon as possible!

I flew from the UK to Schoenefeld airport to the south east of the city, reached easily by local rail, but in the old days it was Tempelhof airport that was an iconic entry point for the German capital. Tempelhof Airport, now closed, is a short ride from the city centre and well worth a visit. It’s closed as a functioning airport now but was still operational when I visited. The main building is absolutely humungous, one of the biggest buildings in the world when first built (it has been in the top twenty) as a Nazi monstrosity in the thirties. It’s basically a central hub with too massive wings flaying out in both directions and encompassing the apron like the arms of a giant. I went into the old booking hall which had a model of a 1930s airplane suspended from the ceiling. It was virtually empty with just a little flight information on the boards, but if Indiana Jones had walked in with his leather jacket and trademark hat, carrying a case containing an Old Testament artefact, I wouldn’t have been surprised. You can walk the perimeter of the airport if you fancy things like that, peering through the fence at the old landing ground. I got to the airport on the underground, and left on the overground at the southern end of the airport, which takes you on a long curve back into the city.




Tempelhof booking hall

I was looking forward to going to the Tiergarten, to the west of Unter Den LInden, a public park since 1742 and covering 207 hectares, which I’d read about beforehand. I guess I was influenced by those images of Germans drinking coffee in all their finery outdoors in elegant cafes in the pre- war days. When you actually get there, it’s like a slice of countryside plonked right in the middle of the city, with the natural look of pastoral meadows and woodland somewhere outside the city. In fact it wasn’t too dissimilar to the slightly unkempt greenery that surrounds the mega palaces of Potsdam, scattered over a vast parkland of trees, shrubs and open grass. The Tiergarten is a pleasant change from the busy city streets, walking through the trees and extensive meadows, stopping at an open air café by the canal for a bite to eat. Over the canal is the Zoological Gardens, the Berlin Zoo and oldest German Zoo. But finely manicured urban park this is not, unless I missed some of it! In London’s Regents and Hyde Parks you find beautifully tended flower beds and more evidence of a fleet of gardeners that ghost in to keep the place on song. The Tiergarten is far more ‘wild,’ if I can use that word. But still very nice and pleasant! You also find the Siegesaulle (Victory Column) here topped with the goddess of victory.



Tiergarten

Like I said, a Travelcard is a necessity, and another train ride out of the city 15 miles to the south west will take you to Potsdam, a gilded town of classical buildings and parkland full of palaces and stately homes. After alighting from the train you can catch the tram through the centre of Potsdam and on to the extensive parkland with more than enough room for everyone. Scattered across this area are various mansions and palaces of different style, size and colour, including the Sanssouci and  Neues Palais palaces. Take your pick, there is a selection of them in the photos below.



Sanssouci Palace

It is here also that you can take a longish walk to the Cecilienhof Palace, now a hotel where the 'BIg Three,' of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met after the war to decide the fate of Europe at the Potsdam Conference. Things must have hardly changed in the last seventy years or so, the hotel is still surrounded by a quiet country park and is approached down a side road of sedate old mansions from a very different world.






Cecilienhof




Neues Palais - the last palace that Frederick the Great had built in the park grounds

The shadow of the Third Reich of course has left its unmistakeable mark on the city. Right in the centre, near the site of Hitler’s bunker,  there is a large open area created as a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe). The Field of Stelae comprises 2711 concrete blocks.



Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

As well as city centre reminders of the Nazi regime, there are also other trips that provide illumination to this era. You can take the train out to the south west edge of the city to Wannsee, now a vacation area for the city and very much leafy suburb. Here you can find a large area of lake and the famous inland beach at Wannsee. Over the water from the beach is the infamous Wannsee villa where the Nazis arranged the ‘Final Solution.’




Wannsee villa

Rear of Wannsee villa

 

It is now an exhibition with rooms telling the story of the Final Solution and the meetings that took place here. You can wander the gardens that fall down to the lakeside.

Wannsee Beach opposite villa

A trip by train to the northern edge of the city 22 miles from the centre will take you to Sachsenhausen, a Third Reich concentration camp and model for other concentration camps. It was the first new camp to be built after the appointment of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler as the German police chief in July 1936. Over 200,000, people were imprisoned here between 1936 and 1945. At first political prisoners were kept there, then later any group defined by National Socialist ideology as racially and biologically inferior, and after 1939 increasing numbers from occupied Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet and Polish military on the 22/23rd April 1945. This site needs several hours and has a comprehensive audio guide. It was part of a whole industrial complex concealed in a residential suburb of Berlin. The camp itself was in the shape of a triangle surrounded by high walls with the usual watchtowers. In the war the area would have been covered in huts. Now there are just a few huts left, one with a large exhibition and stairs down to a mortuary area from a medical centre. There is also a pit area where executions were carried out. I would say you need three or four hours there to get your money's worth.

Execution pit

Entrance to Sachsenhausen



Views of Sachsenhausen concentration camp

Norway - guest post by Les Gosden

On the cruise itself - we had a great time, service on board was excellent as approx 40% of those on board were staff . Food was presented in the modern way of using trendy plates, vibrant sauce colours, no large portions but just right in size. Taste and quality were excellent. Drink prices were fair, it was best to buy a bottle of wine at the meal table than buy by the glass, as the Wine Waitress always sealed the bottle ready for the next day. The wine list was extensive and they had some good Australian Reds. The ship was very stable and sea was moderate 90% of the time. Passengers on board could roam freely and the crows nest (situated on top deck, there are 10 passenger decks) was a social area with tables and chairs and stunning views looking out to sea, with background music. We spent a few evenings chilling with a drink and watching the light fade as the ship gently glided from one fjord to the next. Waiter service was excellent and the guys remembered who had what drinks, even into the next day! The ship had a large theatre with regular shows featuring a South East London magician to singing and dancing troupes.

Aurora cruise ship

Cabins were spacious and spotless, with their own flat screen TV and SKY plus screen digital map updates showing progress of the ship from Southampton to Norway. Showers very modern, clean and spacious. We had a large oval port side window with a wide internal ledge, where you could casually recline and relax with a glass of red, which I did upon leaving Southampton and watched other sea craft in the Solent as we sailed by, very nice.

We travelled through the night and were level with Scotland by Saturday morning, arriving at our first port of call, a fjord with the town Stavanger, berthing Sunday morning.

Watching the ending of another day......

There are certain times when a Pilot has to be onboard the cruise liner. The Pilots boat has come along side the Aurora to despatch the Norwegian Pilot and is now leaving

                                                                                 Aurora in Norway

Evening meal was semi formal and we sat with the same group for the cruise duration, in our case six were all English. Consisting of a retired couple living in Manchester, mother and daughter from Devon & two Essex ladies. We all got on well, had a good laugh, making meal times fun, one evening we were the last sitting and had to move as the second sitting were due in. There were other places you could eat in if you did not want to have the regular slots. There was a burger bar and a pick what you want from a set selection of cooked/uncooked with a vast range of food and some lovely cakes!! Plus an endless supply of coffee, tea or water. Lovely glass sided sun decks, considering we were in the North Sea it was surprisingly hot and sheltered!

Aurora in fjord

Splendour of Norway

Norway we found out is a very rich country and proud that they did not join the EU. The cost of living is high and they have a large pension fund..

Fjordland

Harbour scenes

Splash of colour in Norway

Ypres - Belgium

We disembarked at Dunkirk which looks like a flat as a pancake twin to Calais, windswept seashore with extensive breakwaters stretching out far into the sea and a long channel into port. To your left you can see three massive superstructures being built at the shipyard in the distance, marooned like beached whales on the flat featureless landscape. It is not the greatest entry to the world’s top tourist country.

Leaving the ferry we followed the column of vehicles out towards the main auto-routes and almost got mashed by a Polish lorry with trailer that decided to run ahead into our lane without warning, suddenly tons of trailer loomed at the left edge of our car and proceeded to push us into the line of boulders at the side of the road. Fortuitous braking by our driver avoided a nasty collision where being in the passenger seat I would have been the first one to have been 'kissed' by the lorry.

To get to our destination we decided to follow the auto-route to Lille and then head north into Belgium, but somehow we found ourselves heading up the coast from Dunkirk. However this mattered not as all we had to do was splice off to the right at some point and head into the agricultural plains of Belgium towards Ypres, or Leper as they call it here. So soon we were heading east across a flat Romney Marsh type landscape, without hedges but plenty of ditches alongside the rather straight roads.  A preponderance of tractors told us that this was the Belgian agricultural heartland, a ruler straight horizon only broken by the liberal sprinkling of farmsteads and outbuildings. We passed through a succession of villages which were united in their blandness, with colourless, rather utilitarian dwellings often displaying windows with white closed blinds giving them a rather bleak look.

Ypres town centre

Ypres was smashed in the First World War but is now a stylish town with a great centre and rebuilt public buildings notably the magnificent Cloth Hall which dates back to the 13^th century and St Michael’s Cathedral which were both reconstructed after the Great War. The centre is one of those typically wonderful and rather impressive large European cobbled open areas surrounded by a bevy of classy looking buildings, some big, some small, which create a perfect palette for the eye. It is here under a blue sky that you should sit enjoying a Belgian beer and perhaps a chocolate waffle at one of the numerous cafes and bars around the square. If you head down to the eastern end of the square the road funnels into a residential street leading to the famous Menin Gate, constructed in memory of the 300000 soldiers who perished in the Ypres Salient in the Great War. This is a massive structure in the form of an archway into the town centre covered with the names of countless soldiers. Every day the ceremony of the Last Post is carried out at 8pm. When we were present there was an appreciable crowd and a school choir from Gresham’s School in England performing. It is a poignant and touching memorial to a terrible conflict.

Ypres town square

 

The Menin Gate sits astride a canal which runs through the town centre. Tree lined ramparts with  paths run alongside the canal. You can walk or cycle around the canal network in the town on an extensive web of paths. Cycle hire is a great idea for this area as the whole place is set up for bikes. We went to one bike shop after a midday croque monsieur at a bar just on the edge of the town centre. Here the music took us back to the eighties with its Supertramp background beat. In fact there seemed to be a common theme around the town of slightly dated British rock music. The bike proprietor offered us a normal bike for 10 euro and an electric bike for 25 euro for the rest of the day. We thought this was too expensive for just half a day, and he missed a trick because he could have offered us a discount for a few hours, so we didn’t think much of his entrepreneurship. We found another place nearer the town centre at the Ambrosia Hotel, where a friendly young female helped win our custom.

 Ypres is an insightful window onto the awful catastrophe that was the First World War, and the famous Ypres salient has numerous famous battle-sites such as Hill 60, Hill 62, Hoodge Crater, Sanctuary Wood and Passchendaele. All these are within a few kilometres of Ypres. It was a tremendous education for my somewhat partial grasp of an important historical era. The rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres has a tremendous museum of the conflict , modern, clear and easy to negotiate, with the option of ascending the tower of the hall to catch great views of the town, including straight down to the Regina Hotel below.

Sanctuary Wood cemetery

The museum has tons of interesting exhibits including of a dig a few years ago at a First World War underground installation where all sorts of items were retrieved from the water and mud like flasks and daily tools. There are also write ups on the different armies involved in the campaign, Belgian, German, French and English, with full uniforms displayed. There is a cart that was used to transport the injured together with exhibits of medical kits and instruments. There are also stories about the air corps and aerial photography, life in the trenches, and the rise of the German stormtrooper as a supersoldier.

We also visited the education museum which is lodged in an old church building just off the town square. This traces the history of education in Belgium through history, but unless you are a real education obsessive you shouldn’t spend more than an hour here. You have to learn to ‘speed read’ museum exhibit notes otherwise you’ll be stuck in the seventeenth century section for half an hour. I loved a picture from medieval times which looked like a Belgian Hogarths woodcut of a couple of teachers in a room looking after a huge class of kids who were doing virtually everything dodgy you could imagine, a scene of chaos that seems not far removed from some modern day classrooms. Nothing changes! There were lots of posters and teaching aids on display including the first Apple computers used in classrooms. It was also interesting to see the trend from more didactic teacher led learning to more child centred learning in recent years, a feature reflecting more universal trends.



Chaos of a medieval classroom!

 

St Michael’s Cathedral is a monster church sitting right next to the Cloth Hall, a couple of titans sitting together in a town that could easily be a lot bigger to accommodate such a pair. Again it was rebuilt after the First World War, and dominates the centre of town. The outside is rather gaunt and grey, but the inside is pleasantly more colourful, with impressive decor and stained glass windows. Craftsmen were working on the floor whilst we were there.

 

Inside of St Michael's Cathedral

The Regina Hotel sitting snug on one corner of the square opposite the Cloth Hall gets a very positive review from us. We all had our own large ensuite double room with very comfortable beds, coffee and tea making facilities including a coffee making machine, and of course TV which I did not switch on at any time. My bathroom was clean and large, although the shower head was attached to a fixture just above the bath which is annoying for a tall person like myself who wants to stand properly underneath a shower jet. Full marks for the power of the blast however. The restaurant was OK, quite expensive, but not the best place we ate at. However we did get bed and breakfast and the breakfast was a more than sufficient start to the day in the restaurant area. The proprietor was a very friendly young Belgian with a good sense of humour.
The fire alarm went off at midnight one night and the proprietor and his aide sped around the second floor making sure everyone was OK and trying to find the culprit. It seemed someone had been smoking in their room, a serious breach of decorum.

Regina Hotel from the top of the Cloth Hall

 

We bought a map of the region around Ypres from the Ambrosia hotel which displayed marked bike routes. This is an excellent idea as it corresponds with signs dotted all around the area directing cyclists down one pathway or another, alongside a canal here, a little country lane there, or along the extensive network of cycle paths alongside all the main roads. ‘Nodes’ on the map are little circles with numbers in that mark the end of a particular stretch of route, and a clear sign marks every node in reality. Its cyclist heaven as you’d expect in the Low Countries, with no more than slight undulations in the landscape and a clear separation from main road traffic. Cobbled streets in Ypres are just a little hard on the tyres and bum!

One day we cycled out on a very rough circular tour south - south east from the town centre and ended up taking a detour to Sanctuary Wood and Hill 62. Here there is a large cemetery for British soldiers with significant numbers of tombstones  marked 'known to God.' Just a few yards down the road is the Sanctuary Wood shop, café and trenches. Here for about ten euro you can see an enormous amount of junk from the first world war but all on a rather disorganised basis. There is a bar where you can have a beer or coffee, but beware of the cats if you don't like them wandering over tables! From the bar you can access the museum which has a right jumble of jetsam and flotsam from the war. We spent a while looking into 'magic boxes through a narrow slit for the eyes to observe tons of black and white photos from the war which gave a realistic 3-D impression. That's quite fun. After perusing the museum you can wander out into a small area of woodland with a network of trenches crisscrossing through, with bits of corrugated iron reinforcing the sides, for surely the trenches would have collapsed a long time ago. There is another separate building full of more First World War paraphernalia, but to be quite frank this museum needs an update overhaul compared with the splendid displays in Ypres.



Sanctuary Wood trenches

 

 

No visit to Belgium would be complete without a trip to that chocolate box capital of chocolatiers and top draw medieval prettiness, Bruges. Head north from Ypres on the autoroutes and you are there within the hour. Plan your parking before you go or you might get badly stung. We investigated a city centre car park first but it was time limited, then we found out that to park on the street was expensive even though there were no apparent signs. A local advised us to park at the rail station for about 2 and a half euro, so off we went to find the station but lost it in the traffic , so just found a side street a bit out of town.

You can swan around Bruges for hours looking at the great buildings, medieval town square, admiring the canal system and getting lost down lots of dinky streets. It’s like a big theme park but what did spoil things a little was the funfair in the town square which was almost as incongruous as the Occupy movement tent city outside St Paul’s Cathedral. You can take a boat around the city centre for seven euro, with an audio talk from the captain extolling the ancient buildings surrounding you, you just have to be prepared to wait a while on the boat for it to be filled up.

 

 

 

You can also do the historium in the town square and participate in a walk back into history by wandering through a succession of themed historical rooms with videos telling a love story against the backdrop of medieval Bruges. An audio guide makes things a lot easier.  Mind you this attraction did get some bad reviews on the internet! If you can slip past a chocolate or pastry shop you will still be caught by a posh cafe or restaurant that will suck you into its clutches.

Chic apartments in Bruges

Canal side in Bruges

Whizzing home from Ypres we decided to stop at Poperinge, a small town about eight miles west of Ypres and on the way to Dunkirk. This town was a big time logistics centre for the British army and a place behind the lines which provided field hospitals and also solace from the horrors of war for many a soldier. Here was Talbot House, an oasis for the British army in the very centre of the town, a large house with its quiet gardens where they could relax, Although not a church house as such, it was a place where the Anglican church had a presence. With its light airy rooms, it is now kitted out for bed and breakfast, and the warden serves you a welcome cup of tea in the downstairs dining room before you take a tour of the house. At the top of the house in the attic is a lovely room done out as a chapel, one of the most attractive I have seen.

Here in Poperinge two death cells are preserved in the Town Hall, and also an execution post in the courtyard used by firing squads.

The area is famous for growing hops and the national hop museum is just up the road from Talbot House.

 

 

 

Talbot House chapel